SHERRON WATKINS of Enron COLEEN ROWLEY of the FBI CYNTHIA COOPER of WorldCom

This was the year when the grief started to lift and the worries came in. During the first weeks of 2002, two dark moods entered the room, two anxieties that rattled down everybody's nerve paths, even on good days, and etched their particulars into the general disposition. To begin with, after Sept. 11, the passage of time drew off the worst of the pain, but every month or so there came a new disturbance--an orange alert, a dance-club bombing in Bali, a surface-to-air missile fired at a passenger jet--that showed us the beast still at our door. In the confrontation with...